BLE iBeacon

This tutorial guides you through the process of creating an iBeacon application using NimBLE and Mynewt. At the conclusion of this tutorial, you will have a fully functional iBeacon app.

iBeacon Protocol

A beaconing device announces its presence to the world by broadcasting advertisements. The iBeacon protocol is built on top of the standard BLE advertisement specification. This page provides a good summary of the iBeacon sub-fields.

Create an Empty BLE Application

This tutorial picks up where the BLE bare bones application tutorial document concludes. The first step in creating a beaconing device is to create an empty BLE app, as explained in that tutorial. Before proceeding, you should have:

  • An app called “ble_app”.

  • A target called “ble_tgt”.

  • Successfully executed the app on your target device.

Add beaconing

Here is a brief specification of how we want our beaconing app to behave:

  1. Wait until the host and controller are in sync.

  2. Configure the NimBLE stack with an address to put in its advertisements.

  3. Advertise indefinitely.

Let’s take these one at a time.

1. Wait for host-controller sync

The first step, waiting for host-controller-sync, is mandatory in all BLE applications. The NimBLE stack is inoperable while the two components are out of sync. In a combined host-controller app, the sync happens immediately at startup. When the host and controller are separate, sync typically occurs in less than a second.

We achieve this by configuring the NimBLE host with a callback function that gets called when sync takes place:

static
void ble_app_set_addr()
{ }

static void ble_app_advertise()
{ }

static void ble_app_on_sync(void)
{
    /* Generate a non-resolvable private address. */
    ble_app_set_addr();

    /* Advertise indefinitely. */
    ble_app_advertise();
}

int
main(int argc, char \*\*argv)
{
    sysinit();

    ble_hs_cfg.sync_cb = ble_app_on_sync;

    /* As the last thing, process events from default event queue. */
    while (1) {
    os_eventq_run(os_eventq_dflt_get());
    }
}

ble_hs_cfg.sync_cb points to the function that should be called when sync occurs. Our callback function, ble_app_on_sync(), kicks off the control flow that we specified above. Now we need to fill in the two stub functions.

2. Configure the NimBLE stack with an address

A BLE device needs an address to do just about anything. Some devices have a public Bluetooth address burned into them, but this is not always the case. Furthermore, the NimBLE controller might not know how to read an address out of your particular hardware. For a beaconing device, we generally don’t care what address gets used since nothing will be connecting to us.

A reliable solution is to generate a non-resolvable private address (nRPA) each time the application runs. Such an address contains no identifying information, and they are expected to change frequently.

static void
ble_app_set_addr(void)
{
    ble_addr_t addr;
    int rc;

    rc = ble_hs_id_gen_rnd(1, &addr);
    assert(rc == 0);

    rc = ble_hs_id_set_rnd(addr.val);
    assert(rc == 0);
}

static void
ble_app_advertise();
{ }

static void
ble_app_on_sync(void)
{
    /* Generate a non-resolvable private address. */
    ble_app_set_addr();

    /* Advertise indefinitely. */
    ble_app_advertise();
}

Our new function, ble_app_set_addr(), makes two calls into the stack:

  • ble_hs_id_gen_rnd: Generate an nRPA.

  • ble_hs_id_set_rnd: Configure NimBLE to use the newly-generated address.

You can click either of the function names for more detailed documentation.

Conclusion

That’s it! Now when you run this app on your board, you should be able to see it with all your iBeacon-aware devices. You can test it out with the newt run command.

Source Listing

For reference, here is the complete application source:

#include "sysinit/sysinit.h"
#include "os/os.h"
#include "console/console.h"
#include "host/ble_hs.h"

static void
ble_app_set_addr(void)
{
    ble_addr_t addr;
    int rc;

    rc = ble_hs_id_gen_rnd(1, &addr);
    assert(rc == 0);

    rc = ble_hs_id_set_rnd(addr.val);
    assert(rc == 0);
}

static void
ble_app_advertise(void)
{
    struct ble_gap_adv_params adv_params;
    uint8_t uuid128[16];
    int rc;

    /* Arbitrarily set the UUID to a string of 0x11 bytes. */
    memset(uuid128, 0x11, sizeof uuid128);

    /* Major version=2; minor version=10. */
    rc = ble_ibeacon_set_adv_data(uuid128, 2, 10, 0);
    assert(rc == 0);

    /* Begin advertising. */
    adv_params = (struct ble_gap_adv_params){ 0 };
    rc = ble_gap_adv_start(BLE_OWN_ADDR_RANDOM, NULL, BLE_HS_FOREVER,
                           &adv_params, NULL, NULL);
    assert(rc == 0);
}

static void
ble_app_on_sync(void)
{
    /* Generate a non-resolvable private address. */
    ble_app_set_addr();

    /* Advertise indefinitely. */
    ble_app_advertise();
}

int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    sysinit();

    ble_hs_cfg.sync_cb = ble_app_on_sync;

    /* As the last thing, process events from default event queue. */
    while (1) {
        os_eventq_run(os_eventq_dflt_get());
    }
}